


Strange State

by halotolerant



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Biting, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hannibal is Hannibal, M/M, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings, Will is Will, and so it goes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-19
Updated: 2016-01-19
Packaged: 2018-05-14 23:24:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5762986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being not alone is a strange state. </p><p>Hannibal has yet to grow accustomed to it, although sometimes he thinks it had already changed him too much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strange State

**Author's Note:**

> **Additional Warnings** : Very indirect references to an event involving child harm (NOT carried out by the named characters)

Being not alone is a strange state. 

 

Hannibal has yet to grow accustomed to it, although sometimes he thinks it had already changed him too much. 

 

Technically, Hannibal was not alone in Italy, with Bedelia. He was not alone when, at the houses, there were Miriam and Abigail, and briefly Abel Gideon. He was never really alone in the BSHCI, or at least never unobserved. 

 

Being in company with Will, though. Oh, that is a kind of not alone that actually means something. That changes something. 

 

They crawled from the ocean together, they stumbled to freedom together and now they walk along the pavements of their equatorial retreat side by side, step in step. 

 

There is the not alone that means another person in the bed every night, and in the morning, and the not alone that means sometimes the dishes are washed up and Hannibal forgot even to think of them. There is the not alone that is interruption, in an afternoon planned for reading, of someone who wants to swim and shake sea-water from himself like a dog and be fussed and dried with a towel and demand kisses with his hot salt mouth. 

 

There is the not alone of having to tolerate someone else’s moods and moments, in the strange conjunction of caring about them - if Will sighs and looks mournfully at the horizon, Hannibal feels sad. Sympathy. Never one of his talents. Never even one of his abilities, or so he had thought. He couldn’t leave Will, alive or dead, and be glad of the release from responsibility - and he’s only ever felt that way once before. 

 

And there’s the other kind of not alone which Will has brought him; someone who sees, and sees too much, even over Hannibal’s walls. 

 

“I am quite well, I assure you,” Hannibal says, and goes to sit on the sofa. It’s too hot today, and his shirt is sticking to his back already, and moistening the hair at the back of his neck. He let his hair grow because there were things more pressing than cutting it (and with a stomach wound, a certain level of impossibility), and then it was useful for customs, but now it is too hot and frizzed and tangling. 

 

But Will likes it. 

 

“I didn’t ask if you were well, though, did I?” Will comes across the floor, barefoot and trailing damp footprints. He swims too often for someone who nearly drowned, Hannibal always thinks. Will says things about unfrozen ice and flow and freedom, and goes anyway. 

 

“I am fine,” Hannibal says, and too sharply. With any other co-inhabitant of a space it would be rudeness or (if they had the sense to see it) a threat. 

 

But Will’s face softens and he tilts his head. 

 

“You don’t have to tell me,” he says, and oh, that’s a lie, Hannibal knows that well enough. Will can sink in his teeth and persist as well as he can. Will wants to know what ‘it’ is and a day or a week or a month or ten years from now, he will find out. He’ll dig it out of Hannibal’s heart. And more than likely Hannibal will be weeping with joy for it, by then, the way this is going. 

 

Being not alone is an invasion, of the most fundamental kind. It is not symbiosis, or if it is it is the kind where the two creatures meld in alien cohesion and cannot be separated and survive. 

 

In the face of such inevitable weakness why be strong? But Hannibal can’t allow it. 

 

“Leave me alone, Will,” he says, solemn and direct. 

 

Will sits on the sofa next to him.

 

“Let me,” Will says, and his voice is liquid and longing, his tongue cunning, forked. “You don’t have to tell me, but let me help.”

 

“Why would it help?”

 

“Here, come on.” And Will’s hands go up - slowly, slowly - and across, and one cups Hannibal’s neck and the other drags down his shoulder, and Hannibal is lying with his head in Will’s lap, and furious, and trembling with the emotion he cannot seem to conceal having. 

 

“Something got to you,” Will says, quietly, “it’s OK, I’m here.”

 

Hannibal closes his eyes. Will is running his fingers in Hannibal’s hair, tugging blunt at the knots of it, smoothing over his scalp. Will winds and unwinds the rope of hair around his palm, tugging lightly. 

 

Hannibal’s rage is too intense, too much, blindingly dark. The only thing worse than this feeling is to be seen in it, and Will must know that and still Will sits here, to hurt him, to help him, to prove to him that he is not, can not be, alone.

 

If his eyes burn it is the fury. 

 

“The girl in the newspaper? The one they found? Mischa would have been that age. It’s OK to have feelings about it.”

 

Hannibal bites his lip and rocks slightly and thinks about how feelings didn’t happen to him until Will appeared, and wonders if going out and breaking something - a coconut, a boat, a person’s skull - would let this out of him. 

 

“I don’t want to have feelings,” he hears himself saying. It comes out thick. 

 

And then, more truthful, more awful, more private. “You are hurting me.”

 

Will strokes just as softly as he has been, gentle and tender. “I know. Maybe I like it.”

 

That should be delightful, but Hannibal’s head is stuffed with black smoke and aching muscles, and he wants to shout, he wants to…

 

“So hurt me then,” he says, aiming for detachment and finding despair. 

 

Will takes up his hand, unclenches his fist for him. “Anything,” Will murmurs. “I’m here, aren’t I?” 

 

Will brings Hannibal’s hand to his mouth, and bites down, hard, at the web of skin and then the muscle between Hannibal’s thumb and forefinger.

 

Hannibal relaxes, finally, and buries his face in Will’s thigh with shaking, horrifying, disgusting, fantastic, tear-stained relief. 

 

And Will’s other hand keeps on, and on, stroking gently through his hair.  


End file.
